An activist with environmental NGO Mother Nature who has been documenting the impact of sand dredging in Kandal province’s Sa’ang district was temporarily detained yesterday for flying a drone without permission and for his community activism, a few hours after a meeting between locals and authorities to discuss the dredging.

Hun Vannak was detained yesterday by some 20 provincial police officers in Koh Kor village just after noon. Before his arrest, residents and local authorities had met at a villager’s home, where they aired their concerns over continued sand dredging and its impact on their livelihoods. They say the dredging has caused multiple riverbank collapses, damaging locals’ homes.

The villagers and Vannak also went to the Raka Khpos commune office to protest the ongoing dredging.

Vannak said he was questioned for hours about flying a drone without permission over the weekend, and about his work to help the communities affected by the sand-dredging operations. Before releasing him, officers asked him to sign a document that he said had three conditions: that he inform authorities about future drone flights, that he not get involved in “general government management” and that he not lead “illegal” campaigns that “put security at risk”.

“What they [did] is 100 percent harassment,” he said. “But I’m not afraid.”

In a statement, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights said police were accompanied by four to five uniformed representatives of the Leng Chin Group, one of four companies behind the dredging, at the time of his arrest.

For several hours, fellow activists had no idea where Vannak had been taken, or why he was being held.

Later in the evening, however, Lim Kimsor, a women’s issues coordinator for Mother Nature, said provincial authorities told them Vannak was arrested for allegedly flying a drone without asking permission.

Khim Chankiri, provincial deputy governor, confirmed that provincial police “invited” an activist from Mother Nature to their station today, but maintained he was not aware why. Chankiri added that authorities are trying to solve the sand-dredging problem for villagers.

“We are finding solutions for 15 families who are most affected by riverbank collapses in connection with Leng Chin Group company,” he said.

Kandal Provincial Police Chief Eav Chamrouen did not answer repeated calls, and other police officials couldn’t be reached to clarify why Vannak had been detained.

In June, two other Mother Nature activists were allegedly harassed by police in the same village after helping coordinate a protest over the same issue.

Fellow activist Ly Raksmey said Vannak had only attended the meetings yesterday to take photos and live stream the proceedings. “We did not expect that they would arrest him,” he said, adding that some 20 community members and Vannak’s family yesterday evening went to the police station to show their support.

Sorn Ramana, a project coordinator at the CCHR, said the organisation was “very concerned about this arrest as it follows a clear pattern of judicial harassment against Mother Nature activists”.

Investigators are hunting for the attackers after the damage to the dinosaurs — which were in an outside display area — took place late Saturday at the museum in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory police said.

“The damage sustained to the (three velociraptor) dinosaurs indicate that an angle grinder or hacksaw was used to remove the heads from the body,” they said.

“The offenders had climbed a four-foot fence to gain entry.”

Museum staffer Mitchell Seymour said the damaged dinos were first spotted by visitors, with children puzzled at what happened.

“We went out to check it out and three of our dinosaurs here have been decapitated,” Seymour told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“We had heaps of kids coming up and going ‘oh mum and dad, what’s wrong with the dinosaurs?’

“It’s selfish, and it’s thoughtless is what it is.”

A giant fibreglass dinosaur was stolen from the museum in 2013 and later found in the home of a man who said it was taken as a birthday prank, ABC reported.

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are irritating capital market regulators around the world.

Start-ups are launching new ICOs almost every day, seeking to raise millions to fund their projects via the use of a new cryptocurrency. Investors are sometimes promised big returns, but mostly, they are encouraged to read what the project is all about and participate if they think it’s going to be a great innovation. No doubt, there are some dubious offerings out there.

What irks the mainstream is this: raising money from the public is a highly regulated activity and rightly so. You can’t have anyone willy-nilly approaching the public for investments.

This is why governments have developed laws around fund-raising activities, to protect investors, encourage investments and weed out the wrongdoers.

Then, all of a sudden, you have the ICO phenomenon. Issuers put out white papers and info memos that bare some crude resemblance to the regulator prospectus. There are hardly any safeguards. Importantly, there isn’t an intermediary or regulator who vets through offerings, the backgrounds of issuers and a whole lot of other diligence work in this process.

And guess what? Even in the traditional initial public offering (IPO), after such checks are done, a handful of large IPOs can have inaccurate information or some level of non-disclosure that tampers with the price discovery process.

So, imagine now you have a bunch of people holed up in a rented room drumming up some serious blockchain-based plans to make an industry more efficient. They then write their white paper, put in some notes on the code they are writing to power this enterprise and come up with a cool-sounding name for their new cryptocurrency.

This is then posted on ICO forums with dates for the pre-sale and sale of the said new digital currency. Why would anyone put their money into such unvetted ideas?

To be fair, ICOs in the right hands can be used to raise funds for real cutting-edge innovation in the blockchain world. One of the most well-known investors in ICOs today is Tim Draper, an established venture capitalist whose firm was an early investor in Skype before it was sold to eBay in 2005 for US$4.1 billion. Draper has been among the earliest and most vocal supporters of bitcoin and blockchain innovation.

Draper’s investments in ICOs so far include a self-governing blockchain project (Tezos), a liquidity mechanism for smart contracts (Bancor) and a decentralised tool for fighting email spam (Credo), it has been reported. There are also some members of the cryptocurrency community who are looking to produce standards for ICOs to avoid scams.

So, it is not unexpected that a whole lot of people are investing in ICOs and doing so using the main digital currencies of bitcoin and ether. And this is where one begins to get a feel of this movement.

For starters, you need to have dabbled in bitcoin, the unregulated digital currency with a market capitalisation of around US$53 billion today. So, it is not exactly mainstream investors who would participate in ICOs, but then again, this could be changing.

The rise in the value of bitcoin and ethereum has been well documented and that is galvanising interest. As one knowledgeable person in this area told me, it is the “fear of losing out” or FOLO factor which is driving many to invest in cryptocurrencies and ICOs. In a country where loads of people have already been drawn into illegal investment schemes in the past, ICOs are likely to be well within the radar of a number of Malaysians who seem unfazed by the risky nature of these investments.

The regulators of two hotbed ICO markets have reacted, namely, the United States and Singapore, warning that they may deem ICOs as the sale of a form of security, which therefore needs to be regulated.

Two things could happen. Issuers could now seek to do their ICOs in other markets – many are already talking about Hong Kong becoming the next location of choice. Another possibility, though, is that an issuer could try to word his ICO literature in such a way that it would be hard for any regulator to deem it an issuance of security in any form.

Perhaps, regulators should come up with a new set of guidelines for ICOs. This entails a minimal level of vetting and due diligence on the promoters and verification of technology. Such a move is likely to fly in the face of many people involved in the digital economy. They don’t want to be regulated, arguing that central authorities stifle innovation and add unnecessary costs. Eventually, a middle-of-the-road approach may surface, adding credibility to companies wanting to conduct ICOs.

Malaysia has made some notable progress in encouraging innovation in the financial space by way of the Securities Commission legitimising equity and debt crowdfunding and now moving into the robo advisory space. The central bank has also opened a sandbox to experiment with determined fintech companies that meet some basic criteria. Regulating ICOs should be next.

China’s central bank said it will strengthen regulation of companies engaged in financial technologies or fintech in a bid to prevent risks.

In a report released last weekend, the People’s Bank of China said some financial products offered through internet channels by fintech companies are “systemically important” and hence will be included in its macro-prudential assessment or MPA.

The aim is to prevent cyclical risks and cross-market risk transmission, it said.

Analysts said this is the first time that the PBOC said it will include fintech businesses in its MPA.

Big players in the third-party payment services market and the peer-to-peer or P2P lending market are likely to be included first, they said.

Previously, only big financial institutions, such as banks, brokerages and insurers, who play leading roles in their respective sectors, were regarded as “systemically important” and were included in the MPA framework.

Their debt-to-asset ratio, liquidity, pricing, asset qualities, debt risks and lending policies are assessed by the central bank.

Xue Hongyan, director of the Suning Financial Research Institute, the research arm of one of China’s largest fintech service providers, said considering the definition of “systemically important” services and the market size of all fintech businesses, third-party payment services and P2P lenders are most likely to become the first to be regulated under the MPA framework.

“The PBOC move … is actually a good sign for the fintech market because regulation indicates recognition of importance, and MPA, a mid-to long-term regulation framework, indicates that short-term risks are well handled,” said Xue.

Ma Juan, a credit business manager with Bank of Shanghai, said the widely held view is that the P2P market’s lending almost equals that of mainstream or traditional lenders.

“I don’t need to name any specific provider. But we all know that the combined market size of top three players in the peer-to-peer lending market, and the top two players in third-party payments could easily exceed 1 trillion yuan ($148.8 billion),” she said.

According to Home of P2P Lending, an online information provider focused on the P2P space, China has more than 2,000 online lending platforms whose combined transaction value exceeds 1 trillion yuan. Monthly inflows are somewhere between 30 billion yuan and 50 billion yuan.

The combined transaction volume in China’s third-party payment market was 35 trillion yuan in 2016, and is expected to more than double by this year-end to surpass 70 trillion yuan, according to Analysys International data.

The PBOC report said currently some providers of online financial services lack “self-regulation”, while some are underqualified and are too weak to manage financial risks.

Yang Tao, researcher and fintech expert with the China Academy of Social Sciences, said that strengthening regulation was inevitable as the fast growth of this segment entailed more responsibilities, making compliance key to success.

South Korean scientists from the Daejeon-based Institute for Basic Science have contributed to safely repairing a disease-causing mutation in human embryos via gene-editing technology, marking a major step toward a viable method to prevent inherited diseases.

They co-authored a study published last Thursday in the scientific journal Nature, showing that a mutation linked with a deadly, hereditary heart disease can be corrected in early stage embryos using the CRISPR-Cas9 “gene editing” tool.

The finding is still laboratory-level at the moment, with much more research needed before the method could be applied to human pregnancies. Nonetheless, it suggests that scientists can repair DNA to prevent some babies from inheriting diseases that run in a family.

At the same time, the breakthrough research has re-ignited a long-running debate over the ethics of artificially modifying human reproductive cells, including whether it should be practised at all.

The study was led by the US-based Oregon Health and Science University with scientists from Korea’s IBS and Seoul National University, the California-based Salk Institute for Biological Studies and China’s Shenzhen Engineering Laboratory for Innovative Molecular Diagnostics.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing technique that lets scientists pinpoint, remove and replace a faulty sequence on a strand of DNA. The Cas9 protein works like a pair of molecular “scissors” that eliminates a mutated gene so that it can be replaced by a corrected version.

The international research team targeted a defective gene – the MYBPC3 gene – that causes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a deadly heart condition that affects about 1 in 500 people worldwide. It has no cure and can be caused by inheriting just one copy of the bad gene.

The team inserted sperm from a patient with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, together with the CRISPR-Cas9 tool, into healthy donated eggs at the same time. As the embryo’s cells began to multiply, a high number of them appeared to correct themselves using the nonmutated genes.

The method successfully repaired the error in 42 out of 58 embryos treated, marking a 72.4 per cent success rate. Without the treatment, only 50 per cent of embryos formed by parents made up of one person who carries the defective gene would be expected to be free of that errant gene.

The timing of the CRISPR-Cas9 introduction – injecting it simultaneously with the defective sperm into the healthy egg – was also found to have raised the chances of success in gene repair.

Preliminary studies in China had introduced the gene-editing system after an egg had been fertilised by the sperm. Using this approach, embryos had often displayed mosaicism, in which only some of the cells in an embryo are corrected.

Introducing the editing component earlier in the fertilisation process appears to have largely removed mosaicism, according to the study. Just one embryo showed mosaicism, it said.

“This study vastly improved the probability of preventing inherited diseases from passing on to the next generation using the CRSPR-Cas9 technique,” said Kim Jin-soo, the head of the Center for Genome Engineering at the Institute for Basic Science in Korea, who co-conducted the study.

“By using this technique, it’s possible to reduce the burden of this heritable disease on the family and eventually the human population,” said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, director of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University and the senior author of the study.

Scientists from the Korea-based IBS led by Kim developed the CRISPR-Cas9 “scissors” used in the research.

The Oregon-based research team carried out the experimental portion of injecting the gene-editing technology into the embryos and monitoring the results.

Currently, the US permits privately funded research involving embryonic genetic modification in laboratory settings while prohibiting clinical applications. China does not have any restrictions.

The Kubuqi Desert in Ordos, the seventh-largest in China with an area of 18,600 square kilometres, was once the source of frequent sandstorms hitting the country’s northern areas. The desert’s harsh environment resulted in poverty for local residents, most of who only lived on raising livestock.

Over the past 30 years, great efforts were made to tackle the desertification and improve residents’ living standards. Then an innovative business model that incorporates governments, companies and locals was introduced with the aim of greening the region and creating jobs.

With guidance of governments and investment by companies, farmers and herdsmen started to plant herbs, build solar power stations and develop tourist facilities. In 2006, local governments and Elion Resources Group – a company engaged in ecological environmental protection – invested in building a new village. Doodgatsaa village gathered 36 scattered households and provided them with free training, after which villagers started to run their own businesses.

“In the past, we lived in shabby houses built with dry grass and mud,” said Tserenbaabuu, a 41-year-old herdsman in the village.

Tserenbaabuu and his family now live in a 110-square-metre house. He said their total income has increased to 200,000 yuan (Bt991,000), 10 times as much as in the past when raising livestock was the only source of earnings. It is the prospering of tourism in the region, he said, that has changed their lives.

Doodgatsaa village

A national 4A (the second highest category) tourist site – Qixinghu Desert Eco-tourism Spot – emerged as developers began tapping desert tourism resources. It attracts more than 120,000 tourists annually. The site helped boost tourism in nearby villages including Doodgatsaa village, which has been equipped with 32 home-style hotels.

In partnership with two herdsmen, Tserenbaabuu bought 20 vehicles for off-road driving in the desert, with the help of banks in Ordos.

“A vehicle can hold three tourists, and travelling across the desert will cost each of them 240 yuan,” he said.

He also hired 10 villagers as drivers and pays 4,000 yuan to each monthly from May to October, the peak season for desert tourism. To support the business, he constructed a family hotel that can hold 20 tourists, accompanied by a restaurant to serve meals.

“When the hotel is full at peak season, I can earn 2,000 yuan each day,” he said. A household like his can earn 120,000 yuan annually on average, up from around 10,000 yuan before 2006. “It’s really a great change for me,” Tserenbaabuu said.

China has total desert area of more than 2.6 million square kilometres, according to the sixth Kubuqi International Desert Forum held last week.

The experiences accumulated in the Kubuqi Desert can be a model to share nationwide and worldwide, said attendees at the forum.

Ofo said it had launched a trial at Thammasat University in Bangkok and plans to partner with 10 other universities in the next three months. By then, the services will be available on streets.

The Beijing-based startup plans to operate 6,000 shared bikes in Bangkok by the end of September. And the number is set to increase by 5,000 per month after that.

“We aim to promote a cycling culture and help improve the traffic situation in Bangkok and other Thai cities in the near future,” said Lawrence Cao, Ofo’s head of Asia-Pacific business. “The company has been committed to bringing localised service for riders and providing a sustainable last-mile solution for city dwellers.”

The bike sharing craze that took off in China is now going abroad, as bike-sharing companies eye expanding their overseas presence. Last week Mobike Technology Co Ltd officially rode into Italy, marking the company’s first major push into the European continent after launching services in the United Kingdom, Japan and Singapore.

Operating more than more than 6.5 million bikes in six countries globally, Ofo said it has over 100 million users and has recorded more than 2 billion rides since its debut in 2015. Its top competitor Mobike has rolled out more than 6 million bikes in over 150 cities globally.